


Hung Out To Dry

by maybetwice



Category: Pitch (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angry Sex, Angst and Feels, Baseball, Canon Divergence - post-1x08, Cunnilingus, F/M, Ginny and Mike are fighting, Wall Sex, there's no crying in baseball
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 15:26:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8672653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/maybetwice
Summary: Five weeks after Mike takes the trade to Chicago, the Cubs are in town to play the Padres.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Speculation based on the previews for 1.09, and a few of my own ideas for how the team -- and Ginny! -- would deal with having Mike back in San Diego on the other side.

“Is he showing them our signs?” 

Blip’s voice cracks with incredulity when he leans over the rail in the dugout next to Ginny, pulling back his cap to see clearly. She doesn’t see what he means at first, since she’s been pointedly looking anywhere but the visitor’s dugout for the last four innings. But then Blip jerks his chin back to the other side of home plate and she allows herself to look – _actually_ look – at Lawson for the first time during this series.

Sure enough, he’s hunched close to Arrieta, making a complicated hand motion that Ginny recognizes as the same hit-and-run sign Buck’s been using all game. And, yeah, he’s making the same serious expression he does when he’s talking hitters with Ginny.

Did. The same he _did._

“We changed the signals.” Duarte turns a shrug into a long backward roll of his shoulders, cracks his neck. “Lawson doesn’t know them anymore.”

“You think Mike fucking Lawson doesn’t know every last one of the signs the Padres have used for the last, like, twenty-five years?” Blip rolls his eyes a little, crosses his arms over his chest. “Even if he didn’t, the two of you have been telegraphing every play this whole damn game.”

“Yeah, well,” says Ginny, thinks about Mike’s double deep into left field during the second inning. She’d pitched to him straight down the middle, forgetting for a full second that this wasn’t a normal game at Petco, that he wasn’t crouched behind the plate calling plays. She punches her fist into her glove and ducks back under the cover of her cap. “Fuck him.”

“Harsh,” says Blip, but Ginny thinks the irritated pinch between his eyebrows is because of Mike, not her.

“Whatever.” Ginny mirrors Duarte and rolls her shoulders a few times. “Hey, Duarte, we’re up next.”

“Relax, _mami,_ ” he grins back at her, but he’s already grabbing his weighted bat from the bat boy and swinging it experimentally as Voorhies makes a single.

Duarte must say something when he’s up at the plate, because Ginny’s close enough to see Mike – Lawson, _fuck him,_ it’s Lawson – give a little bristle before he calls the pitch, and it puts her back up again. She twirls her bat in her hands and gives it another practice swing, even though she’s sure she’s going to get the call to bunt, maybe get on base before they get to Omar at the top of the lineup.

Duarte laughs again. Lawson calls the pitch. Duarte swings and Ginny closes her eyes, waiting for the pure sound of the ball landing in Lawson’s glove. Instead, there’s a sharp crack and her eyes snap open just in time to see the ball fly low and deep toward the left corner, just inside the foul pole. She watches it happen in slow motion: Soler scooping the ball off the ground and throwing straight to Lawson, who makes the tag at home before throwing back to third a full second ahead of Duarte. 

Third out.

“Are you kidding?” she shouts, arms wide and feeling just as angry at Lawson for making an objectively good play as she is at Duarte for trying to stretch a double into a triple. 

But the bat boy has his hands out for her bat, strap, and helmet, and the rest of the defense is jogging out onto the field for the bottom of the fifth. Duarte shrugs as he jogs past to grab his gear, Blip passes her glove over to her, Lawson’s on his way to the dugout behind her, and Ginny still can’t move. But it’s when Lawson gives her a nervous grin and flips the ball to her, casual as anything. That’s what gets her. 

Ginny grits her teeth and punches her glove again, stomping off to the mound while Duarte shouts after her, “Hey, remember what I said about relaxing!” 

She thinks she sees Mike – fuck, _Lawson_ – flinch on his way to the dugout. And good, Ginny thinks grimly when she hammers her screwball right into Duarte’s mitt. But it doesn’t have the same sound it did with Mike. The pure sound of a good pitch landing right where she wants it to go. It only pisses her off more.

And then Lawson’s up. 

Ginny imagines that Petco’s full of booing, but the truth is that Mike Lawson’s as popular in San Diego as he’s ever been. He does his stupid little ritual: two steps forward, two back, a shoulder roll, an experimental swing, adjusts his posture. Duarte calls for her change-up and she shakes him off, then does the the same with the screwball. Ginny doesn’t want to pitch to Mike Lawson, World Series contender. She really just wants to hit him in his stupidly handsome face for abandoning her. Abandoning the team. 

She adjusts her grip for a two-seamer and shakes off Duarte a third time, sees Mike’s eyebrows pinch irritably, the way they do behind his mask when she keeps ignoring his calls. And she knows the pitch has gone wrong the instant it leaves her hand, because it’s off-speed and moving more than it should. Ginny gets about half a second of fierce joy out of Mike’s widened eyes before the ball swerves and hits him in the thigh.

“Jesus fuck, Baker,” Lawson swears, just loud enough to carry over to the mound while he hands off his bat and helmet to the bat boy. “You could have aimed a little higher.” 

“It was an accident,” Duarte says hotly, quick to defend her against Lawson, and Ginny is filled with a surge of gladness for his loyalty, even though he must know that it was anything but an accident. She shrugs, refuses to tip her hat, even when Mike stares at her incredulously before taking the walk with an obvious limp.

Ginny refuses to look directly into the dugout, but she can still see Al from the corner of her eye, his hands scrubbing over his face as Buck leans close to hear him. She grabs up her chalk bag and tosses it around a couple times and this time lets Duarte call the pitches for the next two hitters, a strikeout and a neat double play that catches Lawson before second to end the inning.

For the second time in a season, Ginny’s done everything she can to deserve to get beaned and nothing happens. She heads to the dugout for her gear to hit, but Jimenez claps her on the shoulder on his way out to pinch hit for her spot in the lineup. 

Ginny drops her hand to her thigh, wheeling back to look over at the visitor’s dugout as Lawson jogs out with his mask up. Pulling her body back like a rubber band, Ginny turns on Al. “You’re pulling me?” 

“Yeah,” he says grimly, snatching up his clipboard and looking down at her with both eyebrows up. “And you can sit the rest of the series in the bullpen before you incite a riot and get the whole team thrown off the field. Go on and get showered, Baker.”

She doesn’t at first, choosing instead to wander around the empty clubhouse in her cleats, worrying her cap between her fingers as she watches Blip fly out. The clubhouse is scattered with everybody’s stuff, clothes and towels and rubber shoes, but Ginny finds herself wandering to where Lawson’s locker was. The team left it empty out of respect when he went out to Chicago, but Ginny angrily wishes that they’d let someone else use it so she wouldn’t have to look at the gaping space it leaves in the clubhouse.

A roar rises from the stadium outside and Ginny looks to the screens in time to see a ball fly high and over the visitor’s bullpen. A home run. And there, watching the ball soar out of sight before he even drops his bat, is Mike in a gray Cubs jersey.

“Forget it.” 

Ginny stalks into the showers and stands under the scalding spray until her skin feels numb, angrily rubbing the heels of her hands into her eyes. She tries not to think about the wild pitch, or the emotions that played over Lawson’s face before he walked to first. 

The Padres lose the game 4-1 by the time she drags herself from the showers and Ginny can’t help thinking that they’re now six games behind again. She’s filled with savage carelessness, the kind that makes her want to throw a dozen balls at Lawson’s head, because it’s September and the Padres are going to be done for the season in a week and a half and for a hundred other reasons she doesn’t care to think about.

The rest of the team is unusually quiet in the clubhouse when she passes through on her way out. Even Blip only gives her a cursory nod before bending over his phone next to his locker, fingers flying over the screen while he types out a text, probably to Evelyn. 

They’re just playing out the season, but that’s not all blackening their mood. It was bad enough when Mike left when he should have finished his career in San Diego, leaving an empty locker and a team trailing five games in the wildcard race. And it’s not that Ginny or the rest of the team doesn’t understand why it’s happened this way, or that the Padres need to play Chicago before the end of the regular season. It’s only that it was easier when Mike was _gone_ , like he’d died or something. Easier to grieve than have him back at Petco and hitting her pitches instead of calling them.

So _of course_ Lawson is waiting in the hall when she finally emerges, arms crossed and a standard Cubs duffel slung over one shoulder. If not for that one article, he’d look the same as he has the rest of the season. His eyebrows are low and serious over his eyes. Black boots and that old ass leather jacket over a worn t-shirt that Ginny imagines is soft from years of wear. 

He’s still Mike, even now, and it just pisses her off again. How dare he put on the same clothes, the same face as the other Mike. Padres Mike. _Her_ Mike. 

But she just lifts her chin in greeting and says, “Hey,” before pulling her headphones up to her ears. When he rolls his eyes, telegraphing ten emotions in a single movement, her heart leaps up into her throat and threatens to choke her.

“Baker,” he calls after her, loud enough that she’d hear if there was any noise coming out of her headphones. Quiet enough to tell her he knows she’s listening. 

_I don’t have to listen anymore,_ thinks Ginny with unfair defiance. Mike still wants to call the pitches with her and she’s shaking him off because he’s not her catcher anymore. He’s not _anything_ to her anymore. 

But Mike’s been stubborn probably his whole life. Persistent, too, or else he’d never have stayed in San Diego fifteen years with two dismal playoff appearances and nothing else to show for it. She sees him rub a hand through his beard when he says, “Are we going to talk about what happened out there?” 

“Nothing to talk about,” says Ginny, taking the bait. She pulls her headphones back down on her neck and turns to him, a leg cocked off to the side. “Nice weather we’re having. Heard it’s warm in Chicago. See you for the game tomorrow. That what you wanted to hear?”

“You’re not going to tell me that atom ball was an accident, rookie.”

Hot fury flares in her belly. Ginny grinds her teeth together and forces herself to say, “Don’t call me that. I’m not your rookie anymore.” 

Mike blinks a few times and his forehead wrinkles up the way it does when he’s irritated by something. Eyebrows up, lips pressed together tight. This time, not for the first time, it’s Ginny he’s annoyed by. “It’s your rookie year, _rookie,_ ” he continues in the maddeningly restrained tone he adopts when he deliberately shoots past the point. “I’ll call you what I want.”

Ginny stalks toward him until she’s close enough that the couple of inches Mike has on her suddenly doesn’t seem inconsequential. She presses her weight down through the balls of her feet and rocks forward into his face. “You aren’t captain here anymore, Lawson. If you think I’m going to bend over and kiss your ass while you ingratiate yourself with your new squad by giving them our signs, you can kiss _my_ ass.”

This, at least, gets a reaction out of him, if not the argument Ginny expects. Mike lifts a hand, drags it down his face, his mouth half open as if he’s going to speak. But then he sighs instead of speaking, combs his fingers through his hair until it sticks up at an odd angle. “What?” he finally aspirates, conveying more emotions in that single syllable than Ginny has the entire day.

“You were showing them our signs.” She gives him a slight shove, because showering and pacing hasn’t cooled her off and she’s still upset that Al pulled her from the game early rather than letting her face the consequences she deserves. “Blip saw it, too.”

Mike spreads his hands wide, leaving himself open and vulnerable, his stupidly tight t-shirt showing off the taut musculature Ginny’s seen a few hundred times by now. “You changed the signs,” he argues. “I already – you changed them.” 

“Like you don’t know all of them.” She doesn’t mind using Blip’s argument, but it seems hollow now, throwing it in his face. Ginny shoves the flat of her palm into his shoulder again, adjusts her bag, and turns on the balls of her feet to leave again. “Fuck off, Lawson.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” he says, grabbing her forearm with a surprisingly tender grip. Firm, but gentle when he pulls her down one of the smaller hallways and through an unlocked door to an empty office. Then he pulls the blinds and locks the door behind him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” 

“Like I don’t know this whole place better than _you_ , Baker.” Mike drops his blue duffel so the logo hits the floor and leans his ass against the empty desk. “You know I didn’t show them the signs, so what’s going on?” 

As if he doesn’t know. She hasn’t told anyone about the night Mike told her he was going to Chicago. She hasn’t even allowed herself to _think_ about those dangerous memories until now.

It’d meant a lot to her that he’d taken her out for drinks to break the news himself. Not that she needed him to tell her what she’d already figured out on her own after he’d been cagey and irritable for weeks. But it had quickly become something else, or so it’d seemed when Ginny stepped into his open arms and smelled his sharp, heady cologne all around her. Cologne he’d put on for her, only her, and kissed her on the streets of La Jolla like he didn’t care if anyone saw. 

And then that was it. One night that managed to exceed her wildest imaginings – she thought Mike would be good, but he’s _good_ – then he took his flight to Chicago and Ginny went back to work. 

Ginny tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, or that it didn’t matter to her. Even when she found his locker empty for the first time. Even when he never called from Chicago, even though they’d been talking almost every night before he left. It had been easier to just play baseball and pretend none of it happened. Out of sight, out of mind, or something like that.

At least, until Mike came back with the audacity to pretend that he doesn’t know what she’s pissed about.

Ginny throws her gym bag to the floor next to his. “I saw you, too.” 

She’s about to cross her arms over her stomach, but Mike pushes off the desk to stand in front of her. And even though Mike is frowning, his fingertips barely skim the side of her face when he pushes a few damp curls back. It’s soft and familiar, and Ginny’s eyelashes flutter like a butterfly taking flight. He smells like soap and leather and the office smells like disinfectant, but it’s close, almost the same as cologne and ocean spray. It feels like her anger is evaporating around her, and all that’s left is horribly powerful lust and something displaced that she doesn't want to examine now, with Mike here, or ever.

“This isn’t about signs, is it?” 

No, it’s not. It’s about La Jolla, Chicago, and five weeks without so much as a call.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Lawson?” She shoves him back with one hand and pulls him in by the collar of his absurdly soft t-shirt with the other, rocking forward onto her toes to crush her mouth against his. 

Mike’s hand cradles the curving side of her face, the other around her waist now, and he kisses her like he’s drowning. “So, _so_ much, Ginny,” he moans between desperate, eager kisses.

Ginny is dimly aware of her back colliding with the wall, of a needy, inhuman noise she doesn’t recognize as either of them. It doesn’t matter. Her arms coil around his neck and Mike steadies himself on her hips, bucking forward hips first so Ginny feels every hard contour of his body. 

_Every_ contour. She can feel the outline of his cock through his jeans, through the thin layer of her leggings and lycra shirt, and she can hardly help rolling against him with a shivering whimper. 

Mike rolls the waistband of her leggings just enough to slip his hand down the front and stroke his fingers against her slick entrance. He's probably done this a hundred times or more – okay, definitely more – but Ginny could believe it's new to him by his thunderstruck expression. She grinds down against his fingertips and shudders when he obliges her by sliding his middle finger in with measured care, one knuckle at a time. Ginny’s body is burning from the inside out, a dark flush running down her chest and up her arms, a flashfire of need piercing hot in her belly. Mike curls a finger inside her, dragging the calloused pad along a ridge that turns her whole spine to water. Her back arcs and she feels her head hit the concrete wall through the cushion of her hair, piled on the back of her head. 

It's not enough. Mike curls his other hand back around her jaw, romantic as anything, and kisses her like he did that night outside the bar. His beard tickles before it feels good against her cheeks. He coaxes her lips apart and pulls the lower between his teeth and this time Ginny is sure it's him making the desperate, wanting noise that clatters noisily against the walls of the empty office. 

“You left me.”

She doesn't want to say it now, not as Mike is easing a second finger into her and circling the calloused pad of his thumb down the narrow strip of shorn curls on her mound and around her swollen, aching clit. He doesn't deny it. How could he? 

“Yeah,” says Mike finally, rubbing his nose against hers and circling her clit again. Ginny feels his smile when she sucks in a tight gasp for air. She feels like there are lit fireworks behind her eyes, sputtering showers of sparks and slowly building to something spectacular. “Like I said, there's a lot the fuck wrong with me.”

He doesn't apologize. Instead, he pulls his hand from her leggings and kneels in front of her, even though he hisses in pain, either from his knees or the rising bruise. Ginny doesn't apologize for that, either, thinking defiantly of the surprise on his face when the ball swerved wrong. Then she blinks and finds Mike with his face turned up to hers like a supplicant waiting for no more than a word from her.

Ginny spears her fingers through his hair, twists the short strands to grip tighter. “God. Mike. Please.”

She doesn't know what she's asking for, but Mike pulls her leggings down, hooks his arms behind her knees, and lifts her legs over his shoulders. His fingers grip her quads tight to keep her in place as he kisses the smooth, brown skin of her inner thigh, his beard bringing shivers up her liquid spine. Ginny presses her weight into the wall behind her and hears another keening whine in the office that can't be hers, but it's higher and she's never wanted anything so badly, and – _fuck_ , it's her, it's definitely her. 

He noses her open with care, taking his time kissing her as deeply as if it were her mouth. The first drag of his tongue, flicking rhythmically against her clit, nearly breaks her and Ginny thinks he might be smiling when she gives a broken sob and clings to him while her knees quake beside his ears. His beard is soaked from her wetness and, though Ginny knows it's going to leave her scraped up and sore in a few hours, she rocks forward into the relentless push and pull of his mouth. Her whole body feels like a live wire giving off sparks, like she's already too sensitive, too _everything_ to be allowed.

“Mike,” cries Ginny, when heat pools low in her stomach, spills over and down her legs and up into her throat. Color and light ripples behind her eyelids and she's close. She's _so close_ that she feels light-headed, like she's slowly detaching from herself. “Jesus, Mike, I'm – fuck.”

And because Mike has never given less than everything he's got to a task ahead of him, because he must already know that she wants release more than breathing, he doesn't let up. One finger replaces his tongue, then another, and he curls them inside her, like he's coaxing her along. 

“Come on,” he murmurs fondly into her thighs, a sound she feels rather than hears, and it only winds her tighter. “I've got you, Baker, come on.” 

Ginny’s eyes fly open at the sound of her last name, at about the same instant Mike closes his lips around her clit. She bucks violently and his eyes lift to her face, to watch her come apart, and that what does it: holding his worshipful gaze while the world goes nova in slow motion around her. The edge of her vision blurs, sweet, blissful lightness spreads golden warmth through her veins, and Ginny holds Mike’s eyes on hers while it happens.

She blinks. 

There are still spots of light gleaming across the room when Ginny comes back to herself. Mike must have stood sometime in the stupor of her afterglow. He's still holding her up, although her legs are loosely crossed at the base of his back. Inside his jeans, he's still painfully, obscenely hard, but Mike doesn't move to do anything about it. He's just… holding her.

“I might be getting a little old for fucking against a wall,” he remarks casually, careful to keep her steady when he traces his thumb along the upper ridge of her cheek. His knees are probably aching and his back must be on fire, but Mike Lawson wouldn't willingly let anyone know if it killed him, and it might.

“Let me down,” Ginny breathes, sliding one word into the next. Mike does, but he also steadies her when her knees rattle dangerously under her weight. His expression is still wide open and admiring, like he can't get enough of looking at her. Just like that night in La Jolla, after he'd made her come a second time in his bed. The same he'd made when she'd taken him as deep as he could be, when he moaned wantonly into her ear and looked at her like any of this mattered to him. Like he—

She nods to his dick and pushes her hair back from her face, abruptly forcing herself not to think about La Jolla in August. “You need me to do anything for that?”

“Ginny.” There, again, Mike leaves all his emotions there where she can see. He's surprised and a little hurt, and all Ginny can think is, _good, let him feel it, too._

She tucks her chin down and edges the band of her leggings up her thighs, doing anything to avoid looking at him, even though he’s standing directly in front of her with his brow wrinkled up like he’s trying to puzzle her out. 

“I’ve got to go,” she says when she finally trusts herself to look up at him again, straightening her back and looking him in the eye. 

Mike looks away, steps aside for her without a word, although he looks like he wants to say something, a thousand somethings, but he doesn’t. What, Ginny wonders, could he tell her now that would blunt the feeling that he used her? Finally, he rubs a hand through his beard and says, “We should talk about this.”

Ginny grabs up her bag and slings it over her shoulder, fumbles with the lock on the door. “See you at the game tomorrow, Mike,” she says hoarsely, fingers slipping against the lock. He calls her name – her last name – when she finally gets the knob to turn under her shaky hand, and it almost gets her to turn back to him.

But Ginny’s had enough of being left behind, as Mike will certainly do again. It’s who Mike is – Lawson, she reminds herself, he has to be Lawson again. So, she waves over her shoulder as she walks out and tries telling herself that it feels better to be doing the leaving.

**Author's Note:**

> Help, I've fallen into this fandom and I can't get up.


End file.
